Featuring Brian Galle, the Agnes Williams Sesquicentennial Professor of Tax Policy at Georgetown University Law Center, an expert on taxation and nonprofits. Galle recently served as a senior fellow in the division of corporation finance at the Securities and Exchange Commission. He joins us to talk about the proposed tax on university endowments now making its way through Congress. The Republican House Ways & Means Committee issued a press release proclaiming that their bill “holds woke, elite universities that operate like major corporations . . . accountable.” What is the endowment tax and what is its significance for the future of higher education? - 6/11/25

Keith Whittington is joined by Eugene Volokh, the Thomas M. Siebel Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution. He is the author, among other works, of the textbook, The First Amendment and Related Statutes. On May 22, the Department of Homeland Security announced that Harvard University has lost its certification to participate in the Student and Exchange Visitor Program. As a consequence, international students enrolled at Harvard University will no longer be given student visas. Volokh and Whittington discuss what the administration has done and what constitutional questions it raises. - 5/29/25

Keith Whittington interviews Cass Sunstein, the Robert Walmsley University Professor at Harvard Law School, whose scholarly interests include free speech, constitutional law, and administrative law. He recently authored a paper, “Our Money or Your Life!’ Higher Education and the First Amendment,” available here, which explores the First Amendment constraints of federal funding to American universities. Sunstein helps unpack the legal and constitutional questions raised by the Trump administration's strategy of withholding federal grants from schools like Columbia and Harvard to force internal policy reforms. - 5/27/25